Blessington

A west Wicklow town on the Liffey, laid out as a borough by Archbishop Michael Boyle after he bought the lordship in 1667. His St Mary's Church holds the oldest complete set of bells in Ireland, six of them cast in 1682 and still rung twice a week. The Blessington Lakes beside the town were made in 1940 when the Poulaphouca waterfall was dammed, drowning the small village of Ballinahown.

The Blessington gold lunula, now in the British Museum, shows Bronze Age activity, and Rath Turtle Moat was occupied from the 12th century by Norse Gaels and Normans. The place was earlier called Munfine and was part of the lordship of Threecastles. In 1667 Archbishop Michael Boyle bought the lordship for £1,000 and got a royal charter for a borough; Blessington House was begun in 1673 and St Mary's finished in 1683. The estate passed through his heirs, the Viscounts Blesington, to the Hills, later Marquesses of Downshire, who held it until 1908 and built the Market House and other buildings around 1820-30.

In the Civil War anti-Treaty forces regrouped in Blessington after their defeat in Dublin, hoping to strike at Dublin again in July 1922, but they were scattered after a skirmish with Free State troops. On 18 April 1941 an RAF Hampden bomber crashed on Black Hill above Lacken, killing its crew of four; they were buried at St Mary's with full military honours, and the town's shops closed for the funeral. The population doubled between 2002 and 2011.

Drawn from the History section of the Wikipedia article on Blessington ↗, rewritten here and adding nothing it does not say; licensed CC BY-SA 4.0.

• St. Mark's Cross · high cross · 1 km
• St. John's Church, Ballymore Eustace · high cross · 7 km
• Killashee · round tower · 10 km
• Piper's Stones · stone circle · 12 km
• Oughter Ard · round tower · 12 km
• Barretstown Castle · castle · 5 km
• Saint David's Castle · castle · 10 km
• Jigginstown Castle · castle · 11 km

Straight-line distances from the town centre, from each site's documented coordinates.

• Piper’s Stones, Athgreany · Sixteen granite boulders of a Bronze Age circle, with one stone standing apart to the north-east. Dance here on a Sunday, they said, and you join them: the outlier is the piper, the ring is his congregation, caught mid-reel.
• Dún Ailinne · The royal site of Leinster: a 13-hectare hilltop enclosure whose vast timber circles were built for ceremonies, then dismantled and burned.
• Glendalough · Kevin’s valley of the two lakes — a monastic city built in a place chosen for being hard to reach. He died in 618, by which time his school’s fame had already carried across Europe.
• Gleann na Smól — Oisín returns · After 300 years in Tír na nÓg, Oisín came home, touched the ground helping men lift a stone, and aged in an instant — to tell Patrick the tales of the Fianna.
• Glendalough — Kevin and the blackbird · A blackbird landed in his outstretched hand while he prayed, so he held it there — through the laying, the hatching and the fledging. A harsher story from the same valley has him drown a woman who wanted him.

All of these are pinned on the Hidden Ireland map.